Gifts were central to the cultural development of the United States in the nineteenth century. The period saw the distribution of flower lexicons, with their elaborate message codes; the invention of modern Christmas celebrations; the decline, in many branches of Protestantism, of the Father’s judgment of sin in favor of the Son’s gift of redemption; increasingly gaudy and expensive commodity gifts; and the shift in the use of gifts from strengthening social hierarchy to sharing more personal sentiments.For Alexandra Urakova (University of Helsinki), these developments produced literary works by authors who offered theories of the gift that anticipated those of Mauss or Derrida in the twentieth century. Thus she begins with a chapter on writings that explicitly theorized the gift: Emerson’s “Gifts”; Caroline Kirkland’s essays on giving presents (“a sentimental gift theory in utero” [38]); and Mark Twain’s late, morose reflections on the improbability of benevolence.These authors all responded to commodity culture by addressing in one way or another the possibility of genuine altruism in the giving of gifts. Subsequent chapters show how, in different works, gift-giving was not simply problematical but “dangerous.” The works Urakova studies depict how the nineteenth-century social world revealed “the dark, unruly, toxic, or self-destructive side of [gift] exchange” (2). Chapter 3, for example, addresses Lydia Maria Child’s Hobomok in the context of interracial antagonism; chapter 8 analyzes Twain’s The Mysterious Stranger and Henry James’s The Wings of the Dove as reflections on the concept of the gift of death; and chapter 9 presents Christmas stories by William Dean Howells, Mary Wilkins Freeman, and O. Henry to show how the season of giving rides on a substrate of deep psychological depression.The book’s greatest value lies in the middle chapters, where Urakova discusses how gift-giving exposes the complexity of gender and race relations and the ways they were negotiated through sentimental discourse. The gift book, she argues in chapter 4, in one sense was fixed in a heteronormative context, but simultaneously subverted that context. Urakova addresses three stories that first appeared in gift books, Sedgwick’s “Cacoethes Scribendi,” Hawthorne’s “The Minister’s Black Veil,” and Poe’s “The Purloined Letter.” Of these, the Hawthorne tale best represents how gift-book fiction could thwart its social context.Hawthorne had divided feelings about gift books. He long depended on Samuel Griswold Goodrich’s The Token for literary exposure (thirty-seven tales, by Urakova’s count), but he fretted that his dependence “threatened to compromise his literary masculinity” (81). Gift books were for girls. Standard presents from young swains to their sweethearts, their contents inevitably became reflections on gift-giving itself. Nowhere is this clearer than in “The Minister’s Black Veil.” If a gift book is designed for courtship, and each text in the gift book represents a separate gift, Urakova argues, then Hawthorne’s tale is a kind of anti-gift, in that it presents a man determined to make it so that “love or sympathy could never reach him” (Twice-Told Tales, CE 9:48). Parson Hooper’s veil at once makes “heteronormative connection impossible” and “un-genders a feminine attribute” (86), even as it facilitates his connections with whatever was unspeakable in the lives of members of his community. In this sense, in adopting the veil, Parson Hooper makes a “dangerous gift” of himself by upending stable but oppressive social codes that govern his world. In other words, Urakova sees Hawthorne taking a hallowed model of putatively altruistic giving—the suitor’s gift to his beloved—and revising it into something dangerous to, and at the same time purer than, that very model.This inversion of gender signaling, and the consequent danger to the codes of courtship, gets further entangled in chapter 7, where Urakova addresses Hawthorne’s most discussed yet most elusive tale, “Rappaccini’s Daughter.” The whole tale in her reading—not just the tale-within-the-tale about a dangerous gift of a woman to Alexander the Great—centers on the giving of gifts. Noting that gift-book editors sometimes referred to their collections as nosegays (anthology, of course, simply meaning a gathering of flowers), she focuses on the first meeting of Giovanni and Beatrice. He gives her a bouquet—initiating the program of courtship to which gift books were central—but she complicates it by offering, then, withholding her own flower in return. Whatever is going on in this thwarted exchange, the courtship formula has pathetically withered. While following the line of criticism that emphasizes erotic and homoerotic subtexts, Urakova focuses on the significance of the gifts themselves. Giovanni’s gift, purchased from a commercial vendor, is the less pure, Beatrice’s the more dangerous. An Emersonian “portion of [her]self,” it would prove as deadly to him as she was to his drooping flowers. Viewing the doomed courtship in the context of the culture of gift-giving shows how ambiguous the motives of the characters are. When Beatrice asks at the end, “Was there not, from the first, more poison in thy nature than in mine?” (Mosses from an Old Manse, CE 10:127), she is simply articulating the paradox of gifts: while the commodity gift was safe and conventional, the truer, more personal gift was hazardous, exposing the frailty of masculine ideals, the deceptiveness of patriarchal controls, and the ineffectuality of scientific regulation of human conduct.The story, then, is tied up with the dual nature of gift-book anthologies, altruistic, personal gifts that were also highly lucrative commodities; and it is tied up, too, with the negotiation of gender roles and identities, wherein authentic feelings could undermine the social conventions that govern the point of human contact. Ultimately, if viewing “Rappaccini’s Daughter” as a meditation on the nature of gifts does not quite dispel the paradoxes and ambiguities that have always entangled the tale, it nevertheless provides a frame in which many interpretations of the allegory—the nature of art, the power of sexuality, the mechanisms of patriarchy—can inform one another.Urakova marvels that “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” a story that touches on the manipulation and enslavement of the female body, avoids the contemporary issue of slavery. The chapters that come between her two discussions of Hawthorne address the acutely dangerous paradoxes involved in giving the gift of emancipation. The subgenre of antislavery gift books depended on the assumption that freeing a slave was altruistic. In chapter 5, Urakova discusses how some writings by authors such as Lucretia Mott and Frederick Douglass exposed the toxic core of the gift of emancipation, in that it presupposed the legitimacy of ownership of human beings. You can’t give what you don’t own. Accordingly, the gift can be purified only by inverting the social relation. In stories by both white and black authors, black characters become the benefactors of well-intending whites.In chapter 6, a similar pattern of inverting apparent disinterestedness governs Urakova’s reading of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a novel initially marketed as a gift book. In the strongest section, she analyzes the problematical character of Topsy, a figure who appears to resist the novel’s ideal of simple benevolence—“a topsy-turvy gift” (135). Like Beatrice Rappaccini, Topsy has a poisonous nature—she is repeatedly compared to a serpent—and her venom compromises her potential to serve as a commodity gift: she can’t be given away, not because she cannot be owned, but because no one would want her. Ironically, even though she is referred to as a “thing,” the very poison of her nature (Hawthorne would have said that she “could not be made amenable to rules” [The Scarlet Letter, CE 1:91]) preserves her from the “thingness” (133) that enslavement implies. Urakova does not compare Beatrice’s built-in immunity to objectification to Topsy’s, but the juxtaposition of the two chapters itself shows the extent to which gift-giving lay at the heart of the largest social issues of the century.Urakova’s study of gift-giving in nineteenth-century fiction is well researched. In her readings of canonical as well as noncanonical works, she is scrupulous to include as much critical background as she can, both on gift theory and on individual texts. At times her conscientious acknowledgment of the critical background threatens to muddy her own arguments; nevertheless, this readable study is an essential contribution to the understanding of nineteenth-century fiction, nineteenth-century history, and the nature of the gift.